Film Reviews

[rating=9.00] Despite its saccharine sounding name, Diary of a Teenage Girl is a film that will challenge audiences with its no holds barred depiction of teenage lust and infatuation. I imagine that reactions will be mixed pretty evenly into two camps: Those who are compelled by the unflinching look inside the mind of a fifteen […]

[rating=8.00] Writer-director Noah Baumbach has made his name on the backs of quirky characters and their foibles. Greenberg, The Squid and the Whale, and Frances Ha are all, at their hearts, character studies that explore the realities of the dreamers and wishers. It’s his wheelhouse, frankly, and he has become a modern master of zany […]

[rating=5.00] No Escape is the sort of mindless fodder that somehow works best in these late summer months. Perhaps it has something to do with the brain-frying effects of spending several months staring at screens witnessing round after round of city crumbling, earth shattering, mind numbing action that so entrenches itself in mid-year box offices. […]

[rating=7.00] First the bad. American Ultra is, quite possibly, about as dumb a movie as you can see. It’s a genre mashup that offers nothing new for either of its genres, taking stock stoner characters and putting them into stock superspy situations. Nothing you see here is anything you haven’t seen before in a hundred […]

[rating=5.00] The Man from U.N.C.L.E. had the potential to be a lot of things. Crime noir, a period piece, even a solidly cheesy remake of the television show the film was based on. Instead, U.N.C.L.E. reached for all and lost itself in the fold. An early Bond throwback, and spy thriller, this Guy Ritchie directed […]

[rating=8.00] N.W.A. hit the world like an atom bomb, exposing a side of life that existed unseen by the majority. Safe in suburban enclaves, much of America reacted to their debut record, Straight Outta Compton, with revulsion—its gritty depictions of life as a young, black male in California were too much for many to bear. […]

[rating=9.00] The following is a facsimile of the existential freak out had by our critic after screening The End of the Tour. What the fuck am I even doing with my life? I don’t even know anymore. I had goals once, man. I had dreams. I was going to take shit over, hit the world […]

[rating=2.00] Watching Irrational Man can be best described as watching a bunch of WASPs doing and saying a bunch of WASPy things amidst a sea of head-up-your-ass intellectualism that’s every bit as tedious and shallow as a conversation in an all-night coffee shop with an undergrad who’s taking introduction to philosophy. It’s a peek behind […]

[rating=1.00] To call Fantastic Four a monumental piece of shit would be to give it too much credit. For better or for worse, a piece of shit (monumental or otherwise) is something tangible. You could, if you so desired, hold it in your hands and it is the result of a lot of hard work […]

[rating=9.00] Typically, the longer a movie franchise goes the worse the series gets. I think this accounts for the rise of the trilogy as a cultural powerhouse over the last decade. Somewhere along the line, the studios figured out that the law of diminishing returns tends to kick in around entry number four as that’s […]